Posts Tagged ‘history’

A very few decades ago, an author by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky was pilloried by the scientific community for his popular book Worlds in Collision. And most of the scientists who commented on the volume loudly proclaimed that NO, they had not read the book nor would they even bother to read such unmitigated rubbish.

How could they know it was rubbish without reading it?

Years after the “Velikovsky Affair” had ended with the scientists declaring that they had “behaved poorly” one might have thought lessons had been learned… well, somewhere at least.

Dr. Reza Aslan’s new book, Zealot, attempts to examine the historical Jesus and expound on his personal insights into the matter.

Billy Hallowell, of the Blaze, wrote a critique on the book and included what he termed “responses” from Christian authors and theologians.

Uniformly, the Christian scholars scoff at the author for rehashing all the standard Islamic interpretations of the Bible, or for resurrecting Albert Schweitzer’s Historical Jesus. They claim he has not brought anything new to the table and most complain that he is not, strictly speaking, an historian.

What these scholars also uniformly proclaim is that none of them have actually read the book they are bashing but feel they can bash it anyway because of what they have heard other people saying about the book, or what they got off the blurb, or what one of their friends condensed from some television interview.

In other words, theologians have proven that – in truth – they are no different from scientists.

There was a group of Bible scholars using poor circular logic claiming the Bible was correct in that the world began in about 6000BC but God set fossils in the Earth to make it appear older than it was. [Hmm, was that God doing that or Satan?] Naturally, many of the church leaders cringed.

Most talk of evolution versus the Bible claims the dating in the Bible is obviously in error. Of course, the theories of dating cannot be proven any better – but don’t tell a scientist such a thing… they have a theory (translate as “true fact”) to cover just about everything.

So many Biblical scholars have fallen back on the “metaphorical” defense: the older dates in the Books of Moses are metaphorical, not literal. But how can the “word of God” be literal truth if it is metaphor?

Such is the conundrum of the present. The Bible cannot be truth if it is metaphor – and then one has to decide where the metaphor stops and the literal truth begins. If we decide only those parts that do not align with current scientific thought can be taken as metaphor, we are in greater trouble. Nowhere in scripture does God tell us His works have to align with science.

This brings us to a dualistic thought process. We have to believe the Bible is ALL correct and science is correct as well but on different, or parallel, levels.